Understanding Pietism
Overview
Dale Brown began his study of pietism nearly 40 years ago, “during the height of the ascendancy of the bitterly anti-pietistic neo-orthodox scholasticism.” At that time pietism was a bogey implying moralism, subjectivism, emotionalism, and a host of other such “-isms.” Brown set about to assess pietism in its historical situation, and to clearly define it as a term describing a historical movement instead of a group of traits present in contemporary Christianity. Today many Christians are looking to pietism for answers to the problems of postmodernism. The new revision of this classic work will give scholars and laypersons excellent insight into the significant theological movement of pietism.
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- Centers on the theology of Pietism’s early leaders, Philipp Jakob Spener and August Hermann Francke
- Distinguishes between different kinds of Pietism
- Provides insight into Pietist history and theology
- Pietism: What Is It?
- Individualism and Ecclesiology: The Doctine of the Church
- Inner and Outer Word: The View of the Bible
- Life or Doctrine: The Centrality of Regeneration and Sanctification
- Human Spirit or Holy Spirit: The Theology of Experience
- World Negating or World Affirming: The Attitude Toward the Secular
- A Contemporary Critique
Top Highlights
“An integrally related fourth motif is the theology of experience” (Page 28)
“First is a concern for the reformation of the church” (Page 27)
“But because of my historical knowledge of potential degenerations, anxiety often surfaces more quickly in me than in others when I sense an excessive preoccupation with a subjectivity which ignores input from outside (in Christian terms, the Word of God), and fails to display any sense of compassion or mission for the world beyond the group.” (Pages 138–139)
“Calvinistic stress on moral earnestness, biblicism, and more democratic polity were later to become basic to Pietism” (Page 17)
“deplored because of its simplistic classification of people as regenerate or unregenerate” (Page 11)
Dale W. Brown is professor emeritus at Bethany Theological Seminary. His other works include Biblical Pacifism and Another Way of Believing: A Brethren Theology.